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30 Under 30: NationalField Thinks Your Business Needs Its Own Social Network

Edward Saatchi, Aharon Wasserman, and Justin Lewis are the disgustingly young founders of NationalField, a company that has built private social networks for the Obama campaign, Kaiser Permanente and the UK National Health Service. Once the UK NHS, which signed a deal with the company eight months ago, gets all of its 1.3 million employees signed up with accounts, its NationalField account will be the largest private social network in the world.

Like Yammer, NationalField brings social networking to the work place, trying to transform work relationships the same way that Facebook has revolutionized friending.

“It’s not about chatting and friending each other,” says Edward Saatchi, the 26-year-old son of the advertising magnate behind Saatchi & Saatchi. “It’s about numbers and data.”

The three came up with the platform while working for the Obama campaign in 2008 as a way for volunteers and campaign staffers to share information in real-time through a private social network, to keep track of phone calls placed, doorbells rung, and voters registered. They’re signed on as the platform the campaign will use again in 2012. The company currently has 53 clients, which pay a monthly per user fee. The cost is usually eased by the elimination of the company’s Intranet, says Saatchi. NationalField also raised $1.2 million from angel investors this year.

The product looks just like Facebook — and counts Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes as an adviser — though displays focus not on how many friends you have or photos you’ve been tagged in, but on work goals that have been met, progress reports and documents you’ve been tagged with. A sales team might have a bar chart showing who’s in the lead for sales for the quarter. The “status update” field asks not “What are you doing?” as on Facebook but “What are you working on?”

OceanSky, a private jet company, uses the platform, for example, to keep track of where in the world its pilots are, sales data, problems with certain airports, time spent fixing plane parts, and the number of flights flown by each pilot. It creates a home base for a highly mobile set of employees, and ensures that data is easy to access rather than locked up in spreadsheets.

Another thing that is similar to Facebook: the creators see it as a tool for self-comparison and envy.

Saatchi says that National Field has tried to set itself apart from Yammer by introducing hierarchy into its social structure. Friending isn’t flat, so an update from your boss will be given greater priority than one from a colleague. Though part of the appeal of the network is that ideas will float up the hierarchy more easily as well, and lead to a greater amount of performance feedback from bosses.

Their next step? They want to make it easy for engineers to build third party apps that companies can use. So who wants to build the Farmville for corporate efficiency?

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